A gay couple who recently married in the Boulder County clerk’s office filed a counterclaim seeking an injunction to prevent Attorney General John Suthers from enforcing Colorado’s “unconstitutional” ban on gay marriage.

Alex Lopez and Michael Maestas filed the counterclaim to intervene Tuesday in Boulder County District Court.

A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in which the attorney general’s office will ask a judge to order Boulder Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The judge also is being asked to declare more than 100 licenses already issued invalid.

The law firm of Killmer, Lane & Newman, which filed the counterclaim, released a statement saying the attorney general’s office is attempting to invalidate “legal same sex marriages” without giving any notice that Colorado is attempting to “destroy their families.”

“It is the position of intervening Defendants that their marriage is legal despite Colorado’s unconstitutional Amendment 43 defining a valid marriage as being ‘between one man and one woman,’ ” said the motion filed Tuesday by David Lane, a Denver attorney.

Trying to invalidate marriages in court without notifying the families involved is “antithetical to family values and the sanctity of marriage under any standards,” the statement by the law firm says.

Lopez and Maestas were married June 30, the day after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Utah’s ban against gay marriage. On the same day, Denver District Judge Elizabeth Starrs solemnized their wedding vows in her chambers.

Lopez, who is an attorney, and Maestas, who works for a nonprofit company, are foster parents of 4-year-old twin boys. They have been in a relationship for eight years, according to the motion.

The couple’s motion says their marriage is legal, is valid and must be recognized under the due process clause under the Fifth Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.